“Apple’s October 27 special event unveiled new high end MacBook Pros in 13 and 15 inch screen sizes. While the new MacBook Pros may not feature earthshaking innovation, they do offer compelling value,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “Far from losing market share to Microsoft’s Surface Pro and Book, I expect sales and market share to grow based on tapping into pent-up demand among current MacBook users.”

“While the overall appearance of the Pros isn’t radically different (sounds like iPhone 7 doesn’t it?), they nevertheless contain significant innovation. The Retina displays now feature the DCI-P3 wide color gamut that had been brought to iPhone 7,” Hibben writes. “The Force Touch track pads continue to be exclusive to Apple. Apple is one of the first to implement Thunderbolt 3 (T3), and the Pros can drive a pair of Ultra HD external monitors via T3. T3 is implemented through USB C connectors, and the Pros also charge through any of the USB C connectors.”

“The most innovative new feature is the Touch Bar at the top of the Keyboard,” Hibben writes. “Apple’s implementation is very clever and goes a long way towards addressing the touch screen gap with the Windows world. As a programmable control surface, it may well be more ergonomic than a touch screen, at least when the screen is positioned vertically… Although touchscreens are a useful innovation, they provide compelling value for a limited range of use cases such as drawing, and the new Touch Bar has limited that further. I believe that the value proposition of the new Pros is sufficient to drive upgrades and allow Mac sales to once again outpace the PC industry. Mission accomplished.”

MacDailyNews Take: Again, Apple tested touchscreen Macs years ago and rejected what Microsoft is trying to sell to fools today. If you want to touch a screen, get an iPad Pro. It’s made to be touched.

To us longtime Apple watchers, Cupertino seems to be saying, “Multi-Touch on the screen only when trackpads are not part of the device.” – MacDailyNews, November 19, 2008

Does it make more sense to be smearing your fingers around on your notebook’s screen or on a spacious trackpad that’s designed specifically and solely to be touched? Apple thinks things through more than other companies… The iPhone’s screen has to be touched; that’s all it has available. A MacBook’s screen does not have to be touched in order to offer Multi-Touch™. There is a better way: Apple’s way. — MacDailyNews, March 26, 2009

25 Comments

… Bill B. of the Patriots. Got more than a little frustrated with … ‘something’ … and threw it to the ground. Has replaced it with print-outs. Gotta say, not a GREAT alternative. Seems to be working, though.
No mention of it from M$, though.

That’s the thing that really drives me crazy on the new Macbook Pro. Did they really HAVE to eliminate the card slot on a pro model? Someone please tell me why Apple had to do that. Getting so tired of having dongles and adapters everywhere.

It isn’t all that much of a problem to get a WiFi signal through a plastics-based camera body, but it is for the higher end stuff which has a magnesium frame (metal = faraday cage).

Similarly, the bandwidth of WiFi isn’t bad when you’re only pushing around a few dozen JPGs.

But when it is a few hundred RAW files, they get onerous: the theoretical max performance for 802.11a/b/g is roughly 10GB/hour, which means that it will take overnight for me to download each one of my 64GB cards — and the camera battery for the likes of a Canon 7D Mk2 simply doesn’t last that long (just leave its GPS receiver on to verify this … oops).

I agree… bad move Apple.. they have to make the MacBook Pro smaller so the user has room to carry around ALL the needed adaptors, and multiple headphones. I would also think they would somehow incorporate the Apple Pencil. This is supposed to be a PRO. I like the line but not happy with the direction or price.. Apple seems to be getting greedy and we all should of noticed this when they offered the douche bag elitist gold Apple Watch for some in godly price..

Seems like anyone complaining about the SD slot being gone are only the ones who still use cameras that use SD cards. The cloud has become the option of choice for probably 90% of Apples users. They know more about their customers than anyone. I don’t think they make these decisions lightly.

Apple used to be about the artists. Now photographers need new gear to get their images onto a Mac. Musician or DJ’s who use the audio port need new gear. Even retailers who swipe a card on their device need new gear. People who want a magsafe type connector will need a dongle to duplicate that functionality. Heck, I cannot even connect a new iPhone to a new MacBook Pro without a dongle to get to a Lightning connector.

It’s not clear that the new MBPs offer significantly better value for everyone. They do offer all the anticipated incremental improvements, but using faster chips and memory only keeps the Mac on par with the competition. Nobody in the auditorium was blown away, that was clear.

For every one of us that doesn’t care about some of these items, others care A LOT. If you’re replacing any existing laptop, the new MBP will be faster and drive more powerful displays than ever, but you pay $500 more for the gimmick strip plus in my case well over $200 (or more) in adapters and dongles.

If you have pets or small ones, welcome to the new Apple: it’s not repairable or upgradeable so watch out if you’re one who relies on Magsafe’s protection.

Note too that while Apple seems very proud of putting a touchscreen on a Mac, they aren’t so confident in it that they abandoned traditional function keys. Of course then Apple hobbled the base 13″ MBP sans touchstrip so it doesn’t really compete on performance. Nevertheless, I suspect the cheaper 13″ model is going to be a hot seller — it’s the cheapest pro model and for practically anyone it makes the MBA and the 12″ Macbook totally irrelevant. There is literally no reason to buy a MBA today.

And while it’s clear that Apple now focuses only on middle of the market, they are probably undercounting the number of people who are pissed off waiting for replacements to their aging Mac Minis, Mac Pros, iMacs, X-Serves, Airports, and so forth. People want higher end and lower end from Apple. They want an $800 MAcBook and a $700 Mac Mini with dual drives, and they are willing to buy a $10k workstation with all the frills. A company with this much cash really needs to be more things to more people instead of hoarding it all in Ireland. As a first goodwill gesture, I think Apple really needs to bring back the 17″ MBP with more ooph, if they could just keep the price under $4500.

As owner of the 2012 MBPro retina, (and apple 30″monitor) I wanted to upgreade last year but was really holding out for skylake. I ordered a new maxed out MBPro and its gonna be smokin. But I have to admit, for the reasons you outlined above, I would have been happy to get the old form factor with updated chips, screen, touchpad plus one USB-C..
OWC makes a pretty cool USB-c Dock with alot of stuff i need but I wish it had display port out too. Not to fired up about the LG monitors.

As far as “dongles” are concerned, Apple has made the right decision of following their strategy that all of these needs such as SD card slots, HDMI, DVD drives, yes, even serial ports, all of them can be taken care of by adapters or external devices. Why should everyone pay for or deal with things like SD slots when only 5% of all MBP users need them? Or when they do use them it’s only a couple of times a month. Ditto for all these other things.

Apple’s solution is elegant and efficient: we’ll give you a universal port that’s very powerful, and you can add anything you want to it for your special needs.

Apple has always done this, and this is another good example. I think I am typical in having a very low need for dongles, I’m doing just fine living a wireless life…

The most significant aspect of the new MacBook Pros is the price: Apple has positioned the MBP market to the very upper end, to professionals with the income and need for a premium computer. This will greatly affect the sales of the computer, it’s numbers will continue to go down significantly this coming year.

I think this is a big mistake on Apple’s part, they are making the same mistake they made in the 1980s and early 1990s by artificially shrinking their potential market by high prices. This will give the Microsoft and Google worlds a lot of space for asserting and continuing to build out their market. Apple had this window of opportunity (pun intended) of becoming a dominant computing platform ecosystem, but it’s Mac pricing will stop this dead in its tracks, it will greatly slow its growth momentum.